The Monster Archaic
[A haunting bullfight in Lima]

1
The Bull Fight

I tell you this for a truth. Well, it all started out simple and my Grandfather, wellsomething inside his head got triggered. It all took place in the bull-ring at Lima, 1923. My Grandpapa was born in l886, and had retired from boxing long before, unwillingly, but kind of had to. Oh, he had fought the best, Jack Johnson, Sullivan, and then, well I will tell you the story. I didn’t see it happen, how could I, I wasn’t born yet. It was a mystery for many years to me and many others, but I know how he was, and the Peruvian woman he said he was in love with, fine, Latin blood she had, but she didn’t understand, I doubt anyone in Peru understood that warm hot summer day when Anatolee, the blue-eyed gringo went mad, nutty.

He was a brave man though, let no one say otherwise, six foot three, two hundred and fifty pounds, maybe a bit more than that, I can tell by his pictures somewhat, and I read his history. He was from Russia, came over to America as a youth, learned how to fight like Sullivan and Dempsey in the bars and then in the ring. I am Russian myself, in that capacity, like my Grandpapa. The Peruvians laughed at him when he stood up and yelled at the capadores sitting in the arena, when he slipped and the bull gored him, a breathless moment I do expect, perhaps this was the moment the fans took notice of him, for he did it unexpectedly, and thought him a fool, oh I suppose he was more then excited, more than he wished to be anyhow, ‘it is their bullfight,’ he murmured,’ so it is said, and he sat back down.

The lovely Se

Tags: articles, arts, books, bull, bullfight, dennis, dennis siluk, entertainment, lima, peru, poetry, short storyarticles, arts, books, bull, bullfight, dennis, dennis siluk, entertainment, lima, peru, poetry, short story

Share This

At about this time each year, without fail, the lament will go out about how the real meaning of Christmas has been lost. This pre-Christmas tut-tutting is as much of a tradition as the obligatory Christmas cards, and treated in the same casual way. But for many, Christmas was stolen and Dr Seuss’s Grinch didn’t do it.

The economist Karl Polanyi was the first to notice the crime back in the 1940’s. In his classic work, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time, Polanyi drew attention to a remarkable event without historical precedent that discarded everything that had gone before. This was the emergence in the nineteenth century of the market as the central institution in our society, making the exchange of goods and services the key feature of human life, bordering on becoming the very reason for living. Understanding the nature of this transformation is the key to unlocking the crime.

But the latter day beneficiaries of this crime have become masters of subterfuge. With teams of experts, they easily bog down any attempt to get at the real story with complex economic concepts and political jargon. To avoid this we remind them, detective Goran style, that all systems, political, social and economic have one thing in common-people.

One of the tricks of the experts is to talk about these systems as if they exist independently of people. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book and enables the system to develop a life of its own, to exist in its own right with its own goals, ambitions and needs. It is important to remember these systems don’t exist in their own right-we make them, for us. Their only goal is to provide a framework that encourages and enables enough people to like one another enough to live and work together, and that’s all.

Ultimately, it is all about how people interact with one another. Finding the best way to interact has been the goal of humanity since the earliest times. We’ve been searching for the traits and characteristics that make humans like each other and trust each other enough so they prefer to live in society, rather than as a bunch of hermits.

Once we discovered these traits and characteristics, we then set them up as ideal standards of behavior and called them virtues, which found expression in our sense of decency and love. For millennia, chief of these virtues was the idea of self-sacrifice. In other words, we found the best way to get people to like us was to prove that we could be trusted to not only not harm them, but also act consistently in their interest. People whom we can trust in this way we call friends.

We discovered there were levels of trust. The more we could trust somebody the closer was our friendship. But the highest level of trust was when we formed a relationship with another person whom we could always rely on, no matter what, even if it meant that one of us could personally lose out.

We discovered that it was possible to form a relationship that was so strong that each person in this relationship would not think twice in putting down his or her life, for the sake of the other. This we called love.

With the discovery of love, we found the perfect standard for society. We found that a society bound by the ideals of love was not only incredibly strong and resilient, but the whole was greater than the sum of the parts. Individually we were weak and helpless, but cooperating as a society made us so powerful that nothing seemed out of reach, nor impossible.

In cooperating in this way, we discovered the secret of progress. Thus, the evolution of humanity can be seen as an evolution to greater levels of cooperation extending from the clan to the village, to the city and nation, and today, encompassing the whole globe. Christmas is the celebration of the discovery of this secret and veneration for one of its greatest teachers.

In gift giving, we remind ourselves of the central importance of the selfless act, which is the foundation upon which trust, friendship and love is built. In receiving a gift, we are reminded of the practicality of this wisdom-the more selflessly we give the more we receive. This is the secret of life.

Leading up to the Great Transformation, we thought we had not only discovered the secret of creating stable societies, but that we had refined it to a fine art. Naturally, there were disputes and disagreements, some resulting in war, but these related to fringe issues: the central principles of human relations were never in dispute.

Imagine the surprise and shock when a group of thinkers in the Middle Ages suggested this basis of society was so wrong, the only option was to throw it out. That it needed to be replaced with a new system, built on what amounted to an opposite set of beliefs. The idea of self-sacrifice and selflessness was now outdated, they said. According to this new thinking, the opposite characteristic of selfishness was the key to building a new society where trust was no longer necessary. These ideas were initially received with shock and disdain, but eventually they took seed finding expression in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, a work of enormous scope and breadth, earning him the title of father of the social science we call economics.

According to these thinkers, this new economic system was able to transform the vices of society into virtues through the mechanism of the market. Thus pride, vanity and greed should no longer be considered as bad, they said, but should be encouraged and promoted as good because these were the engines of this new society.

In this economic-based society, self-sacrifice, kindness and altruism were to be avoided because these tendencies, they said, created a class of people who were dependent on others. These people could never fulfil their human potential, and rather than being useful, contributing members of society, they became parasites. As such, those who practiced self-sacrifice, kindness and altruism were do-gooders of the worst kind. In their misguided attempt at doing good, they were, in fact, doing great, irreparable harm to those they were trying to help, and to society in general.

Even to this day, most people find it difficult or impossible to reconcile these beliefs. I don’t know of any parent who would deliberately teach their children that sharing and being kind to others was bad, and that being greedy and selfish was good. Despite over one hundred years of indoctrination, most of us still believe the self-centered, the greedy and the proud can never be trusted and should be avoided. It is inconceivable that these characteristics can form the basis of true friendship, let alone love.

Yet, despite our continued misgivings, we continue to hold the market as our central institution because the idea of self-sacrifice-the gift of Christmas-has been stolen. As a result, we are now tied to the market for our material needs, even our very existence, forcing many of us to live a double life. In private and family life, we try to live by the ideals of love and altruism, but in our external dealings, we are forced to live by the law of the market which is self-interest.

Living a double life makes it hard to bring up children in any consistent way. The children hear their parents teach one set of rules, but see them and the heroes of society behaving in exactly the opposite way. And when the heroes of society are the greedy, the vain and the proud; the job of the parents becomes almost impossible.

Living a double life is hard, if not impossible, because as humans we need to live by a consistent set of beliefs. Eventually we gravitate to one set of beliefs, and because our most basic need for survival is linked to the market, we start to adopt the rules of the market as our own, sometimes imperceptibly. This is why selfishness is now the distinguishing characteristic of Western society. This is the reason our society is becoming a society of the lonely, the divorced and the depressed.

Polanyi argued that previously the market was imbedded in society, meaning that all transactions in the market were merely extensions of social relations. In other words, extensions of people relating to people and subject to the same considerations, where profit was merely an incidental by-product, not the sole and only consideration.

As the economics of greed took hold, the market was extracted out of this social context reversing all the normal rules of social interaction in the process. In this new setting, voluntary cooperation and altruism were driven out as people were made to compete against one another. With competition came greed and self-interest, and these were promoted as the key virtues of a new type of human being-the Economic Man.

The new system of economics was ruthlessly efficient, and great strides were made in productivity, but at a huge cost– environmentally and socially. People surrendered their central position in society, becoming just another commodity that could be bought and sold in the marketplace. As a result, relations between people came to be seen as extensions of market transactions, and with this, the Great Transformation was complete-people became nothing more than a means to an end for other people. With this sleight of hand, the gift of Christmas was not just stolen; it was replaced with unthinking consumerism.

In the best tradition of Detective Goran, we place in front of the culprits not only the indisputable evidence of their crime, but also the repercussions. The pain and suffering of millions that go hungry each day and without the basics of life while a small minority live in luxury. The continued, heedless destruction of our biosphere; the crime and the violence in our streets, and the lies and the deceit that passes for politics.

It is time to expose the hoax, cuff the culprits and reclaim the gift of Christmas.

About The Author

George Matafonov is author of Economics of Greed Antivirus: Towards the Great Transformation back from Selfishness to Cooperation. ( http://www.eofg.net )

Tags: arts, authors, entertainment, history, legends.poetry, novels, performing arts, short story, story, writingarts, authors, entertainment, history, legends.poetry, novels, performing arts, short story, story, writing

Share This

1
Shanghai2000

When I first walked down the street by the hotel called, “The Grand Hyatt Shanghai,” I found myself looking over towards the Oriental Pearl Tower; it reminded me of the tower in Kyoto, Japan [1999]. It was a marvelous looking citythis Shanghai, I thought at the time, with its modern architecture and western fashion. Thus, the old civilization I pictured had faded away like the movies of Charlie Chan; whom I watch in the 50s; although I think they made them in the 30s and 40s. Oh, my name is Milton Carpenter, and I write travel articles for a magazine.

As I was about to say, I ended up visiting the beautiful Shanghai Huangpu River a dozen times when I was in Shanghai. Reminds me when I was in San Antonio, Texas [1994], I visited the Alamo five times. I get this sense of wistfulness, or is it nostalgia in me and I go back to the places I love, many times; yes, I see it once, end up thinking about it often and feel it in my soul, and got to go back again and again, until my thirst is quenched. Like in Paris, I went back to Notre Dame several times, each and every time I’m in Paris, and I’m normally only in Paris for less than a week each time; but that’s the way it is for me.

Anyhow, I found myself going back to the river-walk, or front, along the banks of the river over and over in Shanghai. And I should add, rivers calm me, so it is second nature for me to do this, should I find a river, and should I need calming; for example, like in Cardiff, Wales, the river runs right through it, right by its Millennium Stadium, and the Seine in Paris, seems to run right through it, as does the Tames in London, and the Mississippi which runs through St. Paul, St. Louis and New OrleansI end up always in a daze walking by them, or along side of them I should say; as if they were hypnotic.

So I found myself at the riverside watching all the cars go by, like in any big city of eight-million I suppose, such as Lima, or Cairo, but I think the worse traffic is in Madrid, and the worse air pollution is in Quito, Equator, yet I love the city and its people in Quito. As I was about to say, Shanghai has all the electrical gadgets any big city has also, like New York City, or Chicago, Rome or San Francisco. And let me add, Mai has not been forgotten in Shanghai either, his picture is everyplace, like in Habana where Che’s picture is all over.

2
The Huangpu

But it is the river front I wanted to tell you about, the Huangpu River, that is where it all started, and ended. It was most recently I experienced this mishap, which is the best I can call it. The year was, the year of the new century, 2000 AD. I left Beijing, did an article on ‘The Forbidden City,’ I traveled a lot back then. Now they wanted me (The Travel Magazine, Editor) to go to Shanghai and do a travel article on ‘The Dogbianmen Watchtower;’ which I really never got to do.

When I arrived the riverfront was sparkling with reflections from the gold, red, blue, yellow and green neon lights that covered the city riverwalk area. The red Chinese flag was waving in the wind, as a mist filled the port regionit was a whimsical day.

For the most part it was a cool day in late September, and capitalism seemed to be exploding, and free expression likewise. Kids on bikes, art centers open, rolls of lights along the streets patrolling the river, like in Malta, akin to policemen. So I stood leaning against a solid stone divider between the sidewalk, street and the river itself, waiting for the ferryboat to take me down the river on a short tour, it was near dusk.

3
Murder In

He departed the bank of the river along with a crowed of others whom went directly into the dinning hall, which was on the first of the three floors of the huge ferry. He was left alone on the lower deck and paced back and forth in the front of the vesselclose to the bow, watching a dog run loose and listening to a man and women argue some twenty-five feet to his left, they were somewhat covered, better put, camouflaged by a winding white stairway that lead to the second and third decks.

It wasn’t long before the boat and passengers were headed down river. As he looked into the water leaning over the edge of the vessel a giggle of music came out from the loud speakersfading back and forth with some static attached to it, as if the airwaves were being disrupted from a radio antenna; at the same time waves within the river were picking up he noticed, a storm was brewing. He started to fall, to sway a bit here and there as the vessel seemed to wobble with the influence of the torrent waters, consequently creating sluggishness to its forward thrust. Then he fellI should say crashed into moving objects, and he found himself getting wet from the waves, and then the rains came pouring down.

As the storm started to increase so did the waves and everything on the deck become more slippery, icy, slimy, everything started to slide, or tried to slide that could slide: chairs, tables, ropes, lifeboats twisted, lifejackets tied down, all moved about with the rocking of the boat. He looked to the dinning hall, and many folks had gathered by the secured tables, holding on tightlyas others were hanging onto railings overhead.

There, over on the other side of the boat was the couple, in-between two small safety boats, and some lifevests. And that dog, the dog he seen before, he was now slipping and sliding trying to get to the lower deck door and each time he made it, he slide back to the edge of the ship, almost becoming airborne into the water. But a more serious matter seemed to dawn on Milton, the man and woman were actually fighting, in fact pushing and grabbing each other, as the black clouds of Hades-water filled the sky overhead. He seemed as if he wanted to [he being the alleged assailant], trying to throw the woman overboard; she looked at Milton as if in desperation, her attacker was an elder man in his 40s, she a younger woman in her 30s. He was much larger than her, he could see. And should he throw her over, who would know but him. She looked at Milton again: bellowed out,

“Save me, save me, please, he wants to throw me overboard!”

The man looked briefly towards Miltonalmost an indifferent look and went back into a guarded position

he had time for one quick thought, and that was all’save the woman,’ his mind said, ‘it’s now or never.’

Even though he was having trouble saving himself he managed to hurdle himself to their side, and although hethe other manwas more muscular, Milton was quicker with his hands and feet and kneed him in the groin, and as he bent over he throw him overboardwith a quick thrust, landing him into the hammering river. He got his senses back and went to throw a lifejacket to him, yet he could not see him; hence, he bent over to get one and slipped a bit, grabbing onto the cold wet railing and as he did; the woman to the side of him took a hold, a solid grabbing onto the small boat and pushed it against Milton’s side, and he flew head first through the railings into the water with the lifejacket in his hands. As he found himself in the water he had come to the conclusion it was her trying to throw her so called husband in the waters, and he ended up doing the dirty work for her.

4
The water

It was classical he told himself, kicking his shoes off and undressing to his flesh and underclothes in the bogy-cold water; he told himself, ‘where now!’ He was feeling more like a glacier by the minute. She was calling over the railing, “Murder, murder,’ yelling it into the wild storm, into the river in somewhat of a frantic warning. Sure enough he thought, ‘now she’ll tell them all I was the murderer, yet she does not have my name, matter of fact, if I can make it to the shore before the storm lets up, before they come looking for me, whose to say I was even on the boat [?]’ he asked himself, he told himself, which of course was a rhetorical question.

His knees seemed to melt and bend along with his lower body, everything collapsing in the slapping winds and waves of the water; his neck-muscles cramped, his forehead bumped into his lifejacket several times which was halfway on him, but the waves slapped his head so bad he couldn’t tie the strings properly. For the moment the wind was free, and so it seemed to make his eyes evaporate into the thick of the fog; he could only see but a foot or two in front of him.

He had the foretaste of drowning. He put his arms out so he could get more floating buoyancy with his armpits. Yet he knew he had to make it to shore quick or die within these waters, no one was coming back looking for him. What a predicament he had gotten himself into, he admitted. His brain was slipping, he felt like a fossil of a murder. He had killed a man for her, and airily he thought, ‘who was she, nobody but a stranger’ (his heart was still hammering; it told him he was still alive though).

Just then, just when he felt all the earth was dead and its grave was this water, something alive moving by his side touched him a few times, he looked, it was the dog, the dog on the ship, and he was a good size mutt. His big dog eyes looked up to him, barked at him and started paddling to the shoreline. He grabbed his tail and padded with his feet as much as he couldit took all his energy, and every once of hope, and he prayed and prayed, and within fifteen minutes they found themselves laying on the shore, he was still hanging onto the dog’s tail.

The last time I heard, Milton had taken the dog to Lima, Peru, and he is guarding his friend’s house, he lives on top of the roof in a little wooden house, but he never uses the damn house he just sleeps outside and guards the premises; Milton named the dog Tomasa [he died recently].

Author Dennis Siluk, this is his third new short story recently completed you can vist his website: http://dennissiluk.tripod.com

Tags: arts, author, book, china, entertainment, humanitie, murder, mystery, novel, poet, poetry, shanghai, short storyarts, author, book, china, entertainment, humanitie, murder, mystery, novel, poet, poetry, shanghai, short story

Share This